One Reason Why This Former Walmart Grocery Store Is Now A Car Wash

After Walmart closed and sold this former grocery store, it restricted the building's future use from retail competitors and paved the way for its use as a car wash

When Walmart closed its grocery store in a Maumelle, Arkansas shopping center, many assumed that a retail use would replace it.

Perhaps a Big Box retailer or maybe even another grocery store.

But the space was instead backfilled with a use that most did not expect:

An indoor car wash.

The ~30 unit Arkansas-based Splash Car Wash chain acquired the ~35,000 square foot former Walmart neighborhood market located in the north suburbs of Little Rock.

Splash then hired car wash architects at A Plus Design Group Architecture to design a custom retrofit of the former Big Box retail space.

The result was a “European” style indoor car wash with two enclosed wash tunnels, bright LED lighting, indoor vacuum stations and even a kids play area.

Now Splash Car Wash operates in the former Walmart Neighborhood Market retail building and anchors the adjacent 35,000 square foot shopping center.

So how and why did the former Walmart building end up as a car wash?

The Walmart Neighborhood Market store in Maumelle opened in 2008. Walmart owned the grocery store building but not the adjacent shopping center.

But in early 2016 Walmart announced a mass closure event of 269 of its stores and the Neighborhood Market in Maumelle was on the closure list.

While Walmart offered the building for sale after it closed the store and vacated, it refused to sell to a competitor that would re-open it as a grocery store.

Why?

Because Walmart wanted customers of the shuttered grocery store to instead shop at its Walmart Supercenter located only two miles away.

Not only does Walmart rarely sell properties to direct competitors, but it also often places use restrictions on buildings that are sold to real estate developers.

In the case of the Maumelle property, Walmart did not want to market the building for an extended period of time.

So Walmart sold the property to an Arkansas development group in 2016 for $2.2 MM — presumably with a deed restriction that prevented future uses at the site that would compete with Walmart.

The Arkansas developers marketed the building for several years to a limited list of retail prospects that would not violate the restrictive use covenants.

But in 2021 the investment group instead sold the building to the owners of Splash Car Wash for ~$2.5 MM.

A car wash — while an unconventional reuse of a Big Box retail building — did not pose a competitive threat to Walmart and was not a restricted use.

And the Splash Car Wash in Maumelle is not the only Big Box-to-car wash adaptive reuse in the country.

New Jersey-based Valet Auto Wash has repurposed more than 1/2 dozen former Big Box retail buildings as car wash units including three former Toys R Us stores.

Ultimately the adaptive reuse of the Walmart Neighborhood Market in Maumelle as a car wash demonstrates how modern, well built and strategically located retail real estate is not only in high demand but is also functional in many forms.

So it should not be a surprise to see other corporately owned former retail buildings also repurposed for non-retail uses.

It may even be a requirement of the former owner!